Most nights Hurley would sit up late, drinking, and would fall asleep looking for God. He heard leaves falling and trapped, swirling, in the alley out back. And then: the rattle of piss beneath his window and someone warbling a sad song.
Some days he saw gulls, so many gulls, with no water anywhere around, behaving in a peculiar and beautifully aloof manner, yet sometimes almost as if they had orders.
Hurley liked to think he knew well enough when to turn away, and when to sit quietly and let the world go.
The truth is, no, that wasn’t true.
He remembered the ragged man who used to wander the streets of his old hometown, talking about Jesus and feeding the birds in the courthouse square. Sometimes the man carried a sign: “Ask me about Hell! I’ve been there!” Other times the man would talk to himself and laugh, his laughter sounding to Hurley like a marvelous secret that had been whispered in his ear by luminous larks in some long ago darkness.
There were many people in that town, Hurley’s mother had once told him, people who were likely as decent and befuddled as Ulysses S. Grant, and as capable of murderous resolve when push came to shove. Hurley’s mother was a fan of the War Between the States –“fan” was the word she used. She had a large collection of books on the Civil War. Some days when Hurley came home from school his mother would be slumped at the kitchen table, and she would hiss at him between her long fingers, “Don’t fuck with me!”
There had never been anything cognate to anchor him, or so had once claimed an advocate from the state, speaking in some official capacity on Hurley’s behalf.
He was just a boy. His hand was unsteady. His mother had asked him to draw color across her lips.
Am I pretty? she’d asked. Isn’t that better?
It looked awful against the gray. He wanted to smother her, and would have, but the minister who was holding her hand had smiled and winked at Hurley across the bed.
The last night he slept in that house, watched over by a stranger dispatched by the usual bland kindness, the Jesus man became for him a prophet of his imagination, Ezro, hobbled, a man for whom the world and its suffering and shattering light were irresistible. Time and again Ezro appeared in Hurley’s dreams.
They took Hurley away for a time, then let him go. Accused, he guessed, of being no longer young. They thought pills would keep him among the living, a visit now and then with a glum, fat bastard with a basement full of model trains and a tiny, precisely-detailed world for them to rattle through. Cows that never moved. A mailman who was paralyzed at the exact moment he raised his hand to wave.
Hurley did what he was asked and dug for a time, never satisfactorily, never deep enough.
Pride, generally, damned the angels, or at least those that managed to get themselves damned. The fat man accused Hurley of being too proud to dig. Hurley didn’t think that he deserved to be damned for not digging deep enough.
And still Ezro appeared in his dreams.
He saw him in the moonlight, weaving along a dirt road huddled under a pine casket. And every morning Hurley would go out into the world where once Ezro had cried and rejoiced, rejoiced and cried.
And he thought: I could do that.
He thought: Shit, I could surely do that.
